The Logic Behind Explainer Videos

The marketing world is constantly forced to evolve around the shortening of the human attention span. So, all the new methods of marketing and advertising are designed to throw as much information in your brain with as little words as possible, and what is the best way to do that? Explainer videos. Believe it or not, I would believe it, but according to Forrester Research, one minute of video is comparable to delivering 1.8 million words.

Do you know how much 1.8 million words is? That’s enough nouns, verbs, and adjectives to fill 3,600 standard web pages.

Now, in regards to the human attention span, when people are only using their auditory senses (listening), they retain about 10 percent of what they hear – hence why college lecture courses are never the go-to. However, when combining both auditory AND visual, their retention rate takes a nice jump to 68 percent.

Dollar Shave Club: One of the most popular explainer videos ever.

What makes explainer videos so different from any other YouTube video? It’s a video short used by businesses to introduce their company, product, mission etc within 90 seconds or less (150 to 240 words in comparison). Explainer videos offer your potential clients or consumers an explanation of what you do in an entertaining and memorable way – oh! I almost forgot that these videos are typically animated.

So, what’s an instance in which explainer videos actually had an impact? When the popular internet company DropBox first started up a few years ago, no one knew what the heck they did or what a virtual storage company even was. So, they had to market their product which was being able to solve a problem that their target audience didn’t even know they had. They came up with the solution to release an explainer video that condensed all their techy talk that no one could understand into a witty, fun, animated video. The 90 second short gave Dropbox a HUGE boost in funding with 50 million customers and a $4 billion increase. Steve Jobs even looked into buying the company.

When Dropbox did an explainer video, people realized they need it.

There are three major benefits of releasing explainer videos:

Up Your Google Results

Statistics have shown that websites with videos are about 50 times more likely to end up on Google’s wonderful first page, which is what we all want in the end, right? When people visit your website and you have a text link sitting next to a video thumbnail, what do you think they’ll click on first? If you guessed the text link – you’re wrong. Bottom line is, the more people that watch your video, the more your website climbs the Google ladder, and eventually people will start buying your product. You’re making money, everyone is happy.

Become Multi-Dimensional

Explainer videos are not just for the consumer, but for the business partner’s as well. Obviously, these videos are huge within the marketing and advertising world, and what is the number one thing that keeps advertising fresh? Pitch meetings. Explainer video’s allow anyone within the marketing field to pitch an idea from across the country in a far more interesting format. Besides resting in the video nook of your website, these videos can also be used for email marketing.

Increase Overall Conversion

Internet Retailer did a study proving that 85 percent of people are more likely to purchase a product once they have seen the explainer video. CrazyEgg – a site that helps you track every click direction on your website via “heat map” – added an explainer video to their homepage which generated a 64 percent increase in their conversion rate.

Crazy Egg’s explainer video helped increase conversions.

Now, with all that awesome information being said – Go share your company with the world… Explainer video style!